On your place I would go on i7-6850K.
Overclock to 4.2-4.4GHz is excellent for games.
I think you will sacrifice 2-3 fps for 20-25% better CPU in multi threaded applications.
Special now when everyone play on high resolutions where GPU is most important.
Some rumors say Coffee Lake arrive with 6 cores, and maybe Intel plan to abandon 4 cores for i7.

Anyway if you have 55 fps you will need better graphic card, i7-6700K maybe have 177fps and other 170-172.
That's not important for gaming at all, if you drop on 55fps he will not save you, only better GPU.

i7-6850K on 4.4GHz is similar as i7-5930K on 4.7GHz... that's very good CPU for games and for anything.
And I would like to find some cheaper ES example, but I looked last 2-3 weeks and only Xeons V4 are available for half price and similar.
I will continue to search maybe something show up.

z170 platform, price and no gain on x99.

Z170 platform is probably your best value for gaming and typical use. Most AAA game titles can reliably max out two cores; newer ones may be able to use all CPU cores -- looks good on paper but we don't really have enough history to say how efficient they are or if using more cores is making a huge difference or not. Your GPU matters more for framerates at high graphic quality settings. The game engine usually spends more time waiting for the GPU to finish operations than it does for the game's code running on the CPU.

X99 is great if you want to produce the content you see in games -- intensive processing for content creation. Or for bragging rights in benchmarking. It can handle far more than the average AAA title can throw at it. Although, if you do a lot of video encoding, the X99 platform offers the best support. More cores/threads = faster time to completion on any encoding or 3D graphic rendering job.

I will not back on Z chipset, fact that half CPU is iGPU completely depresses me. You pay for CPU where biggest improvement and more than half Intel attention I need to disable.
Sacrifice 10% in single threaded application for 30% improvement in multi threaded and 30% better memory after overclocking Cache for many people are better option.
And some paste, removing IHS... Nooo. When you check Haswell-EX and Broadwell-EX you see nice big processor, with big socket, you know that's CPU only, cores, IMC and you use dedicate graphic.
Than motherboards are not so cool... Even same class, now MSI launch two from same series and nice for compare MSI X99 Titanium vs MSI Z170 Titanium everyone will say X99 is much cooler.

WHO_FARTED? wrote:
Which is better for gaming? I have checked them both out and understand they work with different chip set. About the only big difference besides prices is the amoung of cache each has. One has 12mb and the other has 20mb's. Does that extra cache make it better or faster? Thanks guys

If you don't get the correct hardware to support the cpu then it wont matter

For games Xtreme platform will not give you better performance no matter on Cache, 8-12-15 or 20MB.
But you will definitely see difference during extraction of huge files, encoding video clips and surfing in same time, etc
example if some game size 40GB is packed as 10GB you will wait longer on i7-6700K to finish extraction.
higher cache frequency will work better. In games can't be better than i7-6700K.
But I think point of PC is not only gaming, strictly gaming is good and PS4.
Anyway most people compare Skylake with Haswell-EX, but now you have option i7-6850K.
He could work on almost same speed as i7-6700K, very close, better performance per core than Haswell-EX.
Nice CPU, 8 and 10 Core demand excellent cooling for improving single threaded performance
but i7-6850K is from my perspective best desktop Processor for enthusiasts.
People in USA don't understand when someone from China pack torrent in small file and how time need to system extract that and install.
In such situation xtreme processors are faster and difference is higher than difference between 6700K and Xtreme in games.